My Social Media Detox, part 3: Twitter account
Today is Twitter's shift! Let's see how getting him out of your lives!
Why should I delete Twitter?
Privacy
Twitter's privacy policy allow a pervasive user tracking, according this report by EFF:
Contrary to the inviting “Sounds good” button to accept the new policy and get to tweeting, the changes Twitter has made around user tracking and data personalization do not sound good for user privacy. For example, the company will now record and store non-EU users’ off-Twitter web browsing history for up to 30 days, up from 10 days in the previous policy.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/05/how-opt-out-twitters-new-privacy-settings
Software licenses
In this page on his site, Richard Stallman says:
My last reports (Jan 2019) say it is possible to use Twitter without running nonfree software, and possible to create an account with an email address instead of a phone number.
However, the report said that it is impossible to create an account without running nonfree Javascript software.
Censorship
Censorship of Twitter occurs in accordance with the laws of the countries in which people use the service. On processing a successful complaint from "government officials, companies or another outside party" about an illegal "tweet", the social networking site will notify users from that country that they may not see it.
In other cases the authorities may take unilateral action to block the site: for example access to Twitter is currently blocked in North Korea, China, Iran and Turkmenistan.
Furthermore, rumours that Twitter has begun ‘shadowbanning’ politically inconvenient users have been confirmed by a source inside the company:
According to the source, Twitter maintains a ‘whitelist’ of favoured Twitter accounts and a ‘blacklist’ of unfavoured accounts. Accounts on the whitelist are prioritised in search results, even if they’re not the most popular among users. Meanwhile, accounts on the blacklist have their posts hidden from both search results and other users’ timelines.
How to delete my Twitter account?
Before start deactivation process, i suggest to make a backup of your contents:
- Go to your Account settings and selec Settings and privacy from the drop-down menu.
- Next to Your Twitter archive, click the Request your archive button.
- When the download is ready, you'll get an email with a download link to the confirmed email address associated with your Twitter account.
- Once you receive the email, click the Download button and download the .zip file of your Twitter archive.
Finally, start the deactivation process:
- Go to your Account settings and selec Settings and privacy from the drop-down menu.
- In the Account section of the menu, click Deactivate your account
- Click Deactivate
- Enter your password when prompted and click Deactivate account
Deactivation puts your Twitter account in a queue for permanent deletion, which will happen after 30 days since deactivation.